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Realist Exhibition

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Metropolitan
Realist
Exhibition

It’s 2007 and I’m using LaTex

I’m not sure if I understand what word processors are supposed to do, but I have found that there isn’t one which meets my needs. For me a word processors should be: fast, simple, flexible, and mobile. Most of the time when you want a word processors you want it because you need to type something, not do something advanced, so why does OpenOffice take several seconds to load when Notepad takes a blink of an eye? Typing doesn’t require much technological advances and so anything which takes more than a second or two is clearly lagging behind what state of the art should be. The biggest culprit to this fallacy is the fact that most word processors are hardly simple. When MS Word starts you are presented with half a dozen menus and toolbars each with their unique and rarely used feature. I use the following features: Font size, double/single spacing, lists, header/footers and endnotes/footnotes. These features probably don’t make even one percent of what word processors offer. Perhaps this abundance of useless features is due to vendor’s hopes that their product be flexible. They are indeed flexible so much so that I have found myself stuck trying to fix a list which the word processors insists being indented five times more than I want it to be (or the blank lines that just don’t seem to want to go away). Flexible should be giving me options when I request them, not executing options without my request. Yet with all the flexibility mobility is the one feature that no word processer has yet succeeded in implementing. Mobility is not only giving me a small file which can be read in any computer, but giving me a file which accessible from any computer and that looks exactly like the original one which the user made. Some word processors offer good file sizes, others offer formats which look the same on any computer (ex. PDF) and some offer access to files from anywhere (Google Documents) but no vendor offers one program that does it all. In order to find a solution the problem will be dissected into three parts: language, interface, and platform.

There are several languages for formatting text most notably used today being XML based. It is indeed very good, it offers many features and extensions but it fails at being simple. For every formatting component there is usually two tags associated with it making it highly inefficiently when compared to other languages such as Latex. In Latex every thing is tightly written with small tags and braces. A file can be written in a much smaller space and yet it is readable to the user (if he or she chooses to read the code for his or her document). True, neither XML based languages nor Latex were created for every day use: they all require some sort of GUI.

Any form of formatting other than spaces will most likely require some sort of GUI but not your average GUI. When a designer hears the word GUI he or she most likely thinks of buttons, toolbars, menus and dialog boxes. I believe that the GUI should never interfere with the editing of a document. If I require something from the word processor I should be able to invoke without leaving the editing environment. This implies that a mouse should not be required nor fancy sequence of keyboard shortcuts. Yes, Control-B and things of that nature are alright, but whenever a command is more complicated a user should be able to invoke it by simply typing the feature in the document and pressing a specific key. Example: user needs to add a picture so he or she could type “add picture [press tab]” and a file selector would appear. This way the user never leaves the “editing” mind set to become a button pusher and menu navigator.

If both Language and GUI are simple, mobility should exist very easily. Any platform that supports a Terminal should be able to support a version of this word processor. The file being compromised by a simple language should allow for a very simple implementation of the client to be able to be accessed from the Internet, mobile devices and computers.

Right now the closest thing that exists to such a word processor are text editors which support macros. However, no word processor exists which has implemented the above. HTML editors do a good job except that they are neither made for print nor support a simple GUI. Both the internet and OS X offer a very good platform for a creation of a new kind of word processor.

The online newspaper experience

Text and the way it’s printed for the most part has not changed ever since Gutembergh printed the first Bible. This means that both fonts and formatting have basically stayed the same for hundreds of years. This wasn’t a problem for the most part because paper until a few years back was the primary medium for communication, news papers most importantly. From the oldest paper I have seen, the format and the way articles are positioned have never changed. There is something about the way that the formatting was perfected over the years that makes reading a newspaper a very enjoyable experience (even with its original page numbering system)

However today I find myself reading more and more online versions of newspapers and magazines such as The Economist. Not only is this medium totally new, but neither conventional formatting nor typography works well in it. Take a look at The New York Times for instance. Beisdes columns somewhat existing not a lot else is the same. Blue headlines? Having the time since it was posted instead of the time it was printed? Always the same formatting? Although the newly designed site is much better than the previous one, there is still to wish for I believe.

Part of reading the newspaper in the morning is the artistic surprise I believe. Newspapers are always different and like a painting you are always overwhelemed with all the headlines in different sizes and styles (besides the Wall Street Journal and USA Today which have pretty bad layouts in my opinion). The randomaness and yet solid format of daily newspapers forces one to see everything, unlike lists of news headlines which GoogleNews offers that lets the reader quickly skip the longer headlines (god forbid the reader actually reads everything). In the current style for onlines news you have one of three styles: the google list style (which is extremely ugly and inefective in getting news across to the reader), the CNN style which seems like a Microsft web portal from the 90s, and The New York Times which although better seems to manage to incorporate a bit of everything.

Granted, the medium as it stands has many limitations, and is never manually formatted (unlike newspapers who have professional people dedicated to making all of the articles fit nicely together) yet I think its a branch of computing that still requires a lot of exploring. Imagine the day that all of your RSS feeds are formatted randomly into a newspaper like format. I wouldn’t mind having slightly less current news in trade for a good experience. Reading the newspaper over a nice cup of coffee used to be an amazing experience which I would hate to see disappear.